Competing in an It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World-like race to collect the craziest press quotes in a single week and be crowned Hollywood’s new King of Caprice, Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. have had a rollicking couple of days that have left them neck and neck and hat. Arguably, the contest already belonged to Howard, an old pro who in the past has mused on how life is a go-kart, all his demons are thawing out his refrigerator, and how he won’t date dirty women who use toilet paper. This week, he’s made a concerted effort to preserve his standing by using the Dead Man Down junket to, for example, tell GQ that he voted for himself in the last election, that he’s begun growing his own diamonds, and that he’s not worried about ever going back to the Oscars after losing for Hustle & Flow, because “I won that Oscar in my heart.”

But perhaps even better than winning heart-Oscars and becoming heart-President, Howard also told MovieFanatic how much he enjoyed working with Oprah Winfrey on Lee Daniels’ upcoming White House Follies revueThe Butler—specifically, with Oprah’s “tig ol’ bitties,” the presence of which Howard felt really contributed to their characters’ chemistry. The video is below. As Moviefone notes, Howard wore driving gloves throughout most of these interviews, because “he didn’t want to catch a bug because he’s a new grandfather.” He also says the word “volumptuous,” because.

But then around the outside curve comes Cuba Gooding Jr., swinging through a New York party to introduce himself to a woman as “Dick McWilly,” because sometimes just saying your name and “Remember?... ‘Show me the money’?” grows stale. Sensing that Howard was pulling ahead in their madcap race, Gooding stepped on the gas: “I just got out of jail,” Gooding is quoted as saying. “I had sex with a leprechaun, who had sex with an alligator and got him pregnant. No, I’m lying, the alligator wasn’t pregnant.”

Then, having apparently already had sex with that enchanted, hysterically laughing woman, Gooding left to be the hit of another party that very same evening, where he was seen “telling a guest he was ‘drinking ant piss’ before demonstrating how to ‘milk an ant.’” (“No, I’m lying, piss isn’t produced by milking,” he presumably said.) And then Cuba Gooding Jr. compared Broadway’s upcoming revival of The Trip To Bountiful to a sandwich. Then he sped off into the night, chasing Terrence Howard’s blinking taillights.